The TV Show Every Design Junkie Should Be Watching

There are plenty of lavishly designed shows on TV, but few series are as visually creative as Amazon Original’s The Man in the High Castle. The streaming series, which is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1963 novel and imagines an alternate future in which the Axis powers won World War II, provided production designer Andrew Boughton with a novel challenge: inventing a world that’s familiar but somehow off. “We set out to create upsetting, insidious imagery. Our motto has been ‘Doing violence to the American dream,’” he explains. “Our visual mission was not to make things too different, as that would defeat the purpose of making this ‘mirror’ to examine ourselves and our past and present actions.”

One of Boughton’s biggest challenges in creating an imaginary space and time was where to start—there’s no design library for fictional universes. “With a period film or television program, you can do a lot of definitive research and say with conviction this chair, that car, or that dress did or did not exist,” Boughton says. But The Man in the High Castle, which sees America torn into German, Japanese, and neutral zones, relies on a wilder amalgamation of visual references. “With an alternative period some things would never have happened, such as rock and roll or the stylish American cars of the 1950s,” says the designer. “And some things would have happened sooner, like Nazis landing on the moon as early as 1959.” Heady as it sounds, it’s also wickedly fun. And with the second season coming to Amazon Original this fall, now is the perfect time to binge-watch season one. Read on for Boughton’s thoughts on where The Man in the High Castle’s daringly dystopian design has taken us—so far.

“This frame shows how we invested in the memory of prewar America,” says Boughton. “We created our own group of graphic propaganda posters to show the mindset of the Neutral Zone, a place where nostalgia for lost America could be shown through a depressed intersection in an all but abandoned town.” The team built a large hotel sign and a damaged façade to create the
look of a town that would have been bombed by Nazi airplanes, and vintage automobile and bicycles further frame the time period.

This set for Frank (Rupert Evans) and Juliana’s (Alexa Davalos) basement apartment was designed “to reinforce the idea of being subjugated at the bottom of this alternative society,” says Boughton, noting how the basement windows at each end allow for strong lighting direction.

This set was used for a scene in which the Crown Prince of Japan visits the Nazi Embassy in the Japanese Pacific States. “In the story, the furniture was specifically imported by the Nazis in order to show respect to the visitors,” says Boughton. “And the screen at the back was designed and built to match the feel of research images of official meetings.”

“This image shows how the various signs, vehicles, and moldering buildings would stack up in the camera lens to create the look,” says Boughton. The water tower, signs, telephone poles, wires, and so on were all placed on an exterior back-lot set in Vancouver, where the show shoots, to create this layered impression.

An image of Frank’s art studio in the apartment shows, again, how the high basement windows allow for naturalistic lighting to set the mood.

A dressed location for the Listening Room, which the Japanese Pacific States authority uses to spy on civilians in San Francisco, is at once eye-catching and utilitarian. Overall, Boughton and his team were tasked with creating three different realities with three slightly different color palettes: “Stone grays and Nazi uniform colors for the Nazi-controlled area; Pacific aquas and watery blues for the West Coast Imperial Japanese–controlled area; and all colors, but muted, in the ‘Neutral Zone,’ where people are free of totalitarian oppression in a faded America,” he says.

A set built on a stage for Tagomi’s (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) office was designed to reflect “traditional Japanese culture mixed with a restrained ‘business modern,’” says Boughton. “Western culture would have been defeated, and designers who were not German would have been executed in most cases,” says the designer. “So in the Japanese Pacific States, an alternative version of modernism would have been created.”

This shot shows a market where Juliana’s character sees her sister as an apparition. “We wanted to create a lyrical moment of spiritual overlap where Juliana might see into the other parallel world,” says Boughton. “We used a lot of birdcages to symbolize both her lack of freedom and the possibility of flying off to other worlds.”

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